A personal review

I am not going to do a review of all the developments in online learning in 2016 (for this, see Audrey Watters’ excellent HackEducation Trends). What I am going to do instead is review what I actually wrote about in 2016 in this blog, indicating what to me was of particular interest in online learning during 2016. I have identified 38 posts I wrote in which I have explored in some detail issues that bubbled up (at least for me) in 2016.

I indulged my obsession with knowing the extent to which online learning is penetrating post-secondary education with five posts on this topic. In a field undergoing such rapid changes, it is increasingly important to be able to track exactly what is going on. Thus a large part of my professional activity in 2016 has been devoted to establishing, almost from scratch, a national survey of online learning in Canadian post-secondary institutions. I would have written more about this topic, but until the survey has been successfully conducted in 2017, I have preferred to keep a low profile on this issue.

However, during 2016 it did become clear to me, partly as a result of pilot testing of the questionnaire, and partly through visits to universities, that blended learning is not only gaining ground in Canadian post-secondary education at a much faster rate than I had anticipated, but is raising critical questions about what is best done online and what face-to-face, and how to prepare institutions and instructors for what is essentially a revolution in teaching.

This can be best summarized by what I wrote about the Conference Board of Canada’s report:

What is going on is a slowly boiling and considerably variable revolution in higher education that is not easily measured or even captured in individual anecdotes or interviews.

This was the area to which I devoted the most space, with ten posts on ‘Online Learning for Beginners’, aimed at instructors resisting or unready for online learning. These ten posts were then edited and published by Contact North as the 10 Fundamentals of Teaching Online.

Two fundamental conclusions: we need not only better organizational strategies to ensure that faculty have the knowledge and training they will need for effective teaching and learning in a digital age, but we also need to develop new teaching strategies and approaches that can exploit the benefits and even more importantly avoid the pitfalls of blended learning and learning technologies. I have been trying to make a contribution in this area, but much more needs to be done.

3. Learning environments

Closely linked to developing appropriate pedagogies for a digital age is the concept of designing appropriate learning environments, based on learners’ construction of knowledge and the role of instructors in guiding and fostering knowledge management, independent learning and other 21st century skills.

This approach I argued is a better ‘fit’ for learners in a digital age than thinking in terms of blended, hybrid or fully online learning, and recognizes that not only can technology to be used to design very different kinds of learning environments from school or campus based learning environments, but also that technology is just one component of a much richer learning context.

5. Open education

These posts also tracked the development of open publishing and open educational resources, particularly in British Columbia, leading me to conclude that the OER ‘movement’ has far too narrow a concept of open-ness and that in its place we need an open pedagogy into which open educational resources are again just one component, and perhaps not the most significant.

6. Technology applications in online learning

Amongst all the hype about augmented reality, learning analytics and the application of artificial intelligence, I found it more useful to look at some of the technologies that are in everyday use in online learning, and how these could best be used.

These were more philosophical pieces, prompted to some extent by the wider concerns of the impact of technology on jobs and how that has influenced Brexit and the Trump phenomena.

Nevertheless this issue is also very relevant to the teaching context. In particular I was challenging the ‘Silicon Valley’ assumption that computers will eventually replace the need for teachers, and in particular the danger of using algorithms in teaching without knowing who wrote the algorithms, what their philosophy of teaching is, and thus what assumptions have been built into the use of data.

Image: Applift

8. Learning analytics

Continuing more or less the same theme of analysing the downside as well as the upside of technology in education, these two posts looked at how some institutions, and the UK Open University in particular, are being thoughtful about the implications of learning analytics, and building in policies for protecting privacy and gaining student ‘social license’ for the use of analytics.

9. Assessment

This is an area where much more work needs to be done. If we are to develop new or better pedagogies for a digital age, we will also need better assessment methods. Unfortunately the focus once again appears to be more on the tools of assessment, such as online proctoring, where large gains have been made in 2016, but which still focus on proctoring traditional assessment procedures such as time-restricted exams, multiple choice tests and essay writing. What we need are new methods of assessment that focus on measuring the types of knowledge and skills that are needed in a digital age.

For instance, e-portfolios have held a lot of promise for a long time, but are still being used and evaluated at a painfully slow rate. They do offer though one method for assessment that reflects much better the needs of assessing 21st century knowledge and skills. However we need more imagination and creativity in developing new assessment methods for measuring the knowledge and skills needed for a digital age.

That was the year that was

Well, it was 2016 from the perspective of someone no longer teaching online or managing online learning:

How far off am I, from your perspective?

What were the most significant developments for you in online learning in 2016?

What did I miss that you think should have been included? Perhaps I can focus on this next year.

I have one more post looking at 2016 to come, but that will be more personal, looking at my whole range of online learning activities in 2016.

In the meantime have a great seasonal break and I will be back in touch some time in the new year.

The problems with OER

I was interviewed recently by a reporter doing an article on OER (open educational resources) and I found myself being much more negative than I expected, since I very much support the principle of open-ness in education. In particular, I pointed out that OER, while slowly growing in acceptance, are still used for a tiny minority of teaching in North American universities and colleges. For instance, open textbooks are a no brainer, given the enormous savings they can bring to students, but even in the very few state or provincial jurisdictions that have an open textbook program, the take-up is still very slow.

I have written elsewhere in more detail about why this is so, but here is a summary of the reasons:

lack of suitable OER: finding the right OER for the right context. This is a problem that is slowly disappearing, as more OER become available, but it is still difficult to find exactly the right kind of OER to fit a particular teaching context in too many instances. It is though a limitation that I believe will not last for much longer (for the reasons for this, read on).

the poor quality of what does exist. This is not so much the quality of content, but the quality of production. Most OER are created by an individual instructor working alone, or at best with an instructional designer. This is the cottage industry approach to design. I have been on funding review committees where institutions throughout a province are bidding for funds for course development or OER production. In one case I reviewed requests from about eight different institutions for funds to produce OER for statistics. Each institution (or rather faculty member) made its proposal in isolation of the others. I strongly recommended that the eight faculty members got together and designed a set of OER together that would benefit from a larger input of expertise and resources. That way all eight institutions were likely to use the combined OER, and the OER would likely be of a much higher quality as a result.

the benefits are less for instructors than students. Faculty for instance set the textbook requirement. They don’t have to pay for the book themselves in most cases. With the textbook often comes a whole package of support materials from the publisher, such as tests, supplementary materials, and model answers (which is why the textbook is so expensive). This makes life easier for instructors but it is the students who have to pay the cost.

OER take away the ‘ownership’ of knowledge from the instructor. Instructors do not see themselves as merely distributors of information, a conveyor belt along which ‘knowledge’ passes, but as constructors of knowledge. They see their lecture as unique and individual, something the student cannot get from someone else. And often it is unique, with an instructor’s personal spin on a topic. OER’s take away from instructors that which they see as being most important about their teaching: their unique perspective on a topic.

and now we come to what I think is the main problem with OER: OER do not make much sense out of context. Too often the approach is to create an OER then hope that others will find applications for it. But this assumes that knowledge is like a set of bricks. All you have to do is to collect bricks of knowledge together, add a little mortar, and lo, you have a course. The instructor chooses the bricks and the students apply the mortar. Or you have a course but you need to fill some holes in it with OER. I suggest these are false metaphors for teaching, or at least for how people learn. You need a context, a pedagogy, where it makes sense to use open resources.

Towards an open pedagogy

I am making three separate but inter-linked arguments here:

OER are too narrowly defined and conceptualized

we need to design teaching in such a way that it is not just sensible to use OER but unavoidable

we should start by defining what we are trying to achieve, then identify how OER will enable this.

So I will start with the last argument first.

Developing the knowledge and skills needed in the 21st century

Again I have written extensively about this (see Chapter 1 of Teaching in a Digital Age), but in essence we need to focus specifically on developing core ‘soft’ or ‘intellectual’ skills in our students, and especially the core skills of independent learning and knowledge management. Put in terms of learning outcomes, in a world where the content component of knowledge is constantly developing and growing, students need to learn independently so they can continue to learn after graduation, and students also need to know how to find, analyse, evaluate, and apply knowledge.

If we want students to develop these and other ‘soft’ skills such as problem-solving, critical thinking, evidence-based argumentation, what teaching methods or pedagogy should we adopt and how would it differ from what we do now?

The need for teaching methods that are open rather than closed

The first thing we should recognise is that in a lecture based methodology, it is the instructor doing the knowledge management, not the student. The instructor (or his or her colleagues) decide the curriculum, the required reading, what should be covered in each lecture, how it should be structured, and what should be assessed. There is little independence for the learner – either do what you are instructed to do, or fail. That is a closed approach to teaching.

I am suggesting that we need to flip this model on its head. It should ultimately be the students learning and deciding what content is important, how it should be structured, how it can be applied. The role of the instructor then would not be to choose, organise and deliver content, but to structure the teaching to enable students to do this effectively themselves.

This also should not be a sudden process, where students suddenly switch from a lecture-based format as an undergraduate to a more open structure as a post-graduate, but a process that is slowly and increasingly developed throughout the undergraduate program or a two-year college program where soft skills are considered important. One way – although there are many others – of doing this is through project- or problem-based learning, where students start with real challenges then develop the knowledge and skills needed to address such challenges.

This does not mean we no longer need subject specialists or content experts. Indeed, a deep understanding of a subject domain is essential if students are to be steered and guided and properly assessed. However, the role of the subject specialist is fundamentally changed. He or she is now required to set their specialist knowledge in a context that enables student discovery and exploration, and student responsibility for learning. The specialist’s role now is to support learning, by providing appropriate learning contexts, guidance to students, criteria for assessing the quality of information, and quality standards for problem-solving, knowledge management and critical thinking, etc.

A new definition of open resources

Here I will be arguing for a radical change: the dropping of the term ‘educational’ from OER.

If students are to develop the skills identified earlier, they will need access to resources: research papers, reports from commissions, case-study material, books, first-hand reports, YouTube video, a wide range of opinions or arguments about particular topics, as well as the increasing amount of specifically named open educational resources, such as recorded lectures from MIT and other leading research universities.

Indeed, increasingly all knowledge is becoming open and easily accessible online. All publicly funded research in many countries must now be made available through open access journals, increasingly government and even some commercial data (think government commission reports, environmental assessments, public statistics, meteorological models) are now openly accessible online, and this will become more and more the norm. In other words, all content is becoming more free and more accessible, especially online.

With that comes of course more unreliable information, more false truths, and more deliberate propaganda. What better preparation for our students’ future is there than equipping them with the knowledge and skills to sift through this mass of contradictory information? What better than to make them really good at identifying the true from the false, to evaluate the strength of an argument, to assess the evidence used to support an argument, whatever the subject domain? To do this though means exposing them to a wide range of openly accessible content, and providing the guidance and criteria, and the necessary prior knowledge, that they will need to make these decisions.

But we cannot do this if we restrict our students to already ‘approved’ OER. All content eventually becomes an educational resource, a means to help students to differentiate, evaluate and decide. By naming content as ‘educational’ we are already validating its ‘truth’ – we are in fact closing the mind to challenge. What we want is access to open resources – full stop. Let’s get rid of the term OER and instead fight for an open pedagogy.

The Educational Technology Users Group (ETUG) of British Columbia held an appropriately Halloween-themed get together today called ‘The Little Workshop of Horrors’ at which participants were encouraged to share tales of failure and horror stories in the use of learning technologies.

This seemed to me a somewhat risky strategy but it actually worked really well. First the workshop was held in ‘the Hangar’, a large, covered space in (or rather beside) the Centre for Digital Media, a shared building used by UBC, Simon Fraser University, BCIT and the Emily Carr University of Art and Design. The Centre itself is a good example of collaboration and sharing in developing media-based programs, such as its Master of Digital Media. The Hangar lent itself to a somewhat spooky atmosphere, enhanced by a DJ who often accompanied presenters with ghoulish music.

Audrey’s Monsters

The workshop got off to an excellent start with a brilliant keynote from Audrey Watters on the Monsters of Educational Technology (The link will take you to her book on the subject). She identified a range of monsters (the examples are partly Audrey’s, partly mine):

Frankenstein’s monster that went wrong because its (hir?) master failed to provide it (em?) with love or social company (teaching machines?): in Audrey’s word’s ‘a misbegotten creature of a misbegotten science’,

vampires that suck the blood of students, e.g. by using their personal data (learning analytics?),

zombies, i.e. technologies or ed tech ideas that rise and die then rise again (e.g. technology will remove the need for schools, an idea that goes back to the early 1900s),

giants that become obsolete and die (Skinner, Merrill)

the Blob, which grows bigger and bigger and invades every nook and cranny (MOOCs?)

and the dragons, are the libertarian, free-market, Silicon-valley types that preach the ‘destruction’ and ‘re-invention’ of education.

Audrey Watters’ larger point is that if we are not careful, educational technology easily turns itself into a monster that drives out all humanity in the teaching and learning process. We need to be on constant watch, and, whenever we can, we need to take control away from large technology corporations whose ultimate purpose is not educational.

Not only was it a great, on topic, presentation, but it was also such a pleasure to meet at last Audrey in person, as I am a huge fan of her blog.

Confessions

Then came the confessional, at which a series of speakers confessed their sins – or rather, classic failures – about educational technology, often in very funny ways. What was interesting though about most of the tales was that although there was a disaster, in most cases out of the disaster came a lot of good things. (As one speaker said, ‘Success is failing many times without losing your optimism’; or ‘ A sailor gets to know the sea only after he has waded ashore.’).

One presenter reported going to a university to ‘sell’ Blackboard but was so nervous that her presentation was so bad they ended up going with Canvas (you see what I mean about some good coming out of these disasters!) Another described how over 20 years she has been trying to move faculty into more interactive and engaging technology than learning management systems, yet here she is still spending most of her time supporting faculty using an LMS.

One talked about spending years trying to promote IMS-based learning objects, only to find that Google’s search engine made meta-data identification redundant. Revealingly, he felt he knew at the time that the meta-data approach to learning objects was too complex to work, but he had to do it because that was the only way he could get funding. More than one speaker noted that Canada in the past has spent millions of dollars on programs that focused heavily on software solutions (anyone remember EduSource?) but almost nothing on evaluating the educational applications of technology or on research on new or even old pedagogies.

Another spoke about the demise of a new university, the Technical University of British Columbia, that was a purpose-built, new university deliberately built around an “integrated learning” approach, combining heavy use of on-line learning with mixed face-to-face course structures – in 1999. However, by 2002 it had only about 800 FTEs, and a new incoming provincial government, desperate to save money and eager to diminish the previous government’s legacy, closed the university and transferred the students (but not the programs) to Simon Fraser University. Nevertheless, the legacy did live on, with many of the learning technology staff moving later into senior positions within the Canadian higher education system.

I see instructional designers, educational technologists or learning ecology consultants (which was a new title for me) as the Marine Corps of the educational world. They have seen many battles and have (mostly) survived. They have even learned how to occasionally win battles. That’s the kind of wisdom of which academic leaders and faculty and instructors should make much better use.

One participant had such a bad ed tech experience at Simon Fraser University that she thinks of it as ‘the haunted house on the hill.’

This article has made me realise the still massive difference between what actually happens on campus and the future we are moving to. This article is written primarily for campus book store managers and makes me think that they don’t know what’s going to hit them over the next few years.

The article was based on a survey that came to the following conclusion:

students and faculty prefer printed textbooks but cost and enhanced learning experiences are fuelling interest in the transition to digital and ultimately to adaptive learning courseware and platform-based products… content creators… will continue to proliferate…conditions will favor retail giants and smaller niche players

The article then goes on (not surprisingly) to argue that campus store managers should play a key role in making decisions about course materials and related services.

Why they are in for a shock

We’ve already seen that BCcampus has now developed online, open textbooks for most of the core curriculum for first and second year university and college courses, saving students over $1 million in text book costs. How long before other jurisdictions move in this direction?

Secondly, increasing amounts of research, data and learning materials are now available through open access journals. Increasingly ‘niche’ textbooks for more advanced or higher level courses will also be available online through Amazon, Apple and other ‘retail giants’ – or delivered to the student’s door. Faculty and students will increasingly use online open educational resources as content. And finally, faculty and instructors will increasingly move away from recommending ‘packaged’ content to getting learners to find, analyse, integrate and evaluate the massive amount of content that will be freely available over the Internet, thus facilitating the development of learners fit for a knowledge-based society.

So the day when students have to queue for hours in the book store for the first few days of the semester should become a distant memory, as soon as possible. More seriously, why then would book store managers be involved in decisions about learning content any more?

Sure there will always be a role for a store on campus, and it may have a very small section for niche books, but campus ‘book stores’ will soon be as outdated as typewriters.

As soon as I finished the book, I discovered that there was in fact a small but significant literature on agile learning design, and that there were other people ‘out there’ practising agile learning design.

So when I was approached by the British Columbia Educational Technology Users’ Group (ETUG) to do a ‘Tuesday’s ETUG Lunch and Learn’ (T.e.l.l) webinar on any aspect covered in the book, agile learning design was an obvious choice. ETUG is a great community of practice, and there were bound to be several agile learning practitioners in the group. So I prepared a few slides, and then used the webinar as an opportunity to have a professional ‘chat’ about agile learning design. Here’s what ensued (a recording of the whole webinar will be available from ETUG shortly and I will add the link as soon as it becomes available).

Defining agile learning design

Well, I did my best to define it in both Scenario F and Section 4.7 ‘Agile Design’: Flexible Designs for Learning’. Originally I started to describe this teaching method as flexible design, but because flexible learning has a broader and more widely used meaning, almost at the last draft stage I changed ‘flexible’ to ‘agile’, as this represented better what I was trying to get at. However, after I finished the book, I discovered that ‘agile learning design’ has a history emanating from software design, as can be seen by this diagram by Jennifer Bertram of Bottom Line Performance (2012):

However, I felt that even the Bertram diagram was too ‘systematized’ to capture the ‘open-ness’ of the agile design process being used in ETEC 522 and other ‘lightweight’ design models in online learning. So from my perspective, the Bertram model is just one of many possible agile design approaches.

Designing for a VUCA world

In my book, I draw on Claire Adamson’s description of the kind of world in which our students now need to learn and live. In particular, teachers and instructors need to prepare students for a world that is:

volatile

uncertain

complex

ambiguous.

VUCA requires a strategy for coping with unavoidable changes and events that may arise. Agile learning design enables both instructors and learners to operate and teach and learn in such an environment.

When to use agile learning design?

The contexts in which there is a need for agile learning design could include the following:

areas where the subject matter is particularly dynamic, or where examples that illustrate more abstract contexts are frequently occurring. Subject areas that are about, or strongly influenced by, digital technologies, for instance, or political science, economics, or environmental studies, where examples and new thinking are constantly developing, need an agile design that enables changes in the subject area or the external environment to be quickly incorporated into the teaching and learning;

where the course or program has very diverse students with very different needs. Agile learning design allows the instructor to take into account the various needs of students and to design the course or program accordingly. Since the students and their diversity are likely to be different on each offering of the course, the design needs to change from offering to offering;

where appropriate teaching and learning tools are under constant change and development. For instance, any course that uses social media to enable student networking will need to integrate new tools and applications as they develop;

where the main goal is to enable students to develop appropriate skills to cope with a VUCA world, in whatever field they may be studying. This will mean presenting constantly changing and challenging course content, methods and tools, but within a framework that enables students to develop the skills needed to cope with such an environment.

It can be seen then that agile learning design has great potential for developing the knowledge and skills that students will need in a digital age.

Teaching economics? Would agile design enable you to include the Greek crisis as it develops? Image: Getty Pictures, 2015

Guidelines for agile design

Trying to set guidelines for agile learning design is a little like trying to establish rules for managing chaos. Nevertheless, successful agile designers need to be guided by a set of pedagogically sound principles, otherwise the course or program will quickly get out of hand, or students will feel lost and confused. Here are some suggestions, although there are many other possible guidelines that will need to be identified through greater experience from using such designs:

clearly defined and measurable broad learning goals that are communicated to and understood by the learners; these are likely to focus on learners covering and understanding certain core content and developing specific skills and will usually be determined by the instructor in advance of the course;

sub-goals or topics, negotiated with learners – particularly important for very diverse students within a course;

core learning materials and tools chosen in advance by the instructor; learners will be responsible for discovering and analyzing other learning materials and will be free to incorporate or negotiate the use of other tools; for instance, the instructor may decide that everyone will use a common course ‘platform’ such as WordPress, and assessment will be through a single e-portfolio software, but students may also use other tools that can be linked to WordPress and/or their e-portfolios; these decisions may vary across different offerings of the course;

assessment based on pre-determined criteria linked to the broad learning outcomes set for the course; again there may be room for some negotiation of assessment criteria between instructor and learners;

vision: a clear idea of what the overall goals, methods, and assessment for the course will be, and an open, flexible approach to achieving these goals; this is probably the most important requirement from the instructor.

Some agile learning designers may find even these guidelines to be too restrictive.

Conditions for success

We need more research and evaluation on agile learning design to determine the conditions for success, but the following are likely to be critical:

learners will need careful preparation and orientation to a style or method of teaching with which they will be unfamiliar; it will be particularly important to stress the development of key skills that will carry over into work and life after graduation;

there needs to be a wealth of appropriate and relevant high quality open learning resources and digital tools that students can access and use;

constant and on-going communication between instructors and students, feedback, and evaluation will all be necessary to enable the course and methods are adapted as appropriate;

there will need to be sufficient minimum structure and content to pass any institutional or professional course approval process; the focus should be though on broad learning goals, core materials, and clear assessment criteria, rather than on detailed content;

at this stage, it is difficult to see how an agile design could be scaled up to large numbers of learners for a single instructor, although a team teaching approach may both strengthen the teaching and enable larger numbers of students to participate successfully.

In conclusion

I find agile learning design to be one of the most exciting and potentially powerful means of developing the knowledge and skills needed in a digital age. Even among the limited number of participants in the ETUG webinar, there were at least two who were engaged in agile learning design. However, more experimentation, applications and evaluation are needed, and it is important that we do not converge too quickly on ‘best practices’ in this design method until it has been explored and applied more generally.

I would particularly appreciate hearing from anyone ‘out there’ who has been using agile learning design methods and what they believe are the conditions for success.

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed by Tony Bates, and all other participants in this blog, are the individual's views and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Contact North | Contact Nord.